Eternity
by PutAnotherX
Summary: The Mute knows one thing above all else: he would do anything for Diarmuid. From the second he opened his eyes on the shore of Kilmannán to see a strange young monk, their fates had been inextricably tied together. Originally posted on AO3
1. Shore & Camp

_"Where to?"_ the man asks. Diarmuid looks again to where Frére Geraldus had disappeared beneath the sapphire glass. For a moment, he is tempted to follow.

He swallows.

 _"Back to shore,"_ he says.

For no reason that Diarmuid can decipher, the man obeys.

* * *

The man rows away, toward things Diarmuid can only guess at, leaving him on the shore. Each step he takes toward the unmoving Mute fills him with dread.

Diarmuid rolls him onto his back, the arrow that killed Brother Ciarán pointing up to the heavens out of the Mute's stomach. A weak pulse flutters at his neck, and his breaths are shallow and labored.

The remaining soldiers begin to approach. Slowly, slowly, the horses' hooves sink into the wet sand as they took measured steps.

"I'm sorry," Diarmuid whispers to his friend. There is nothing he can do. Nothing he can say except, "I'm so sorry." He hopes the Mute hears him. He stands to face the advancing army of three.

* * *

It takes all the strength Diarmuid has left not to fall to his face when the soldiers toss him to the ground in the middle of the French encampment. The bones of his wrists scrape together, bound much too tightly in front of him with rough, fraying rope. The skin underneath the rope is broken and begins to bleed, and his fingers begin changing colors from lack of blood.

The Baron de Merville storms to the group. He yells in French, and Diarmuid can't make out a single word of it. One of the soldiers answers, pointing a crooked finger in Diarmuid's face.

The Baron's eyes fall on him. He feels panic rise in his chest. The Baron grabs Diarmuid's face in one hand, lifting him in the air by the chin. He drags him until his back hits a round wooden pole in the center of the encampment, shouting orders to his soldiers the whole time. Tears burn hot in the corners of Diarmuid's eyes, but he fights them back.

 _"Mon fils,"_ the Baron hisses, his face mere inches from Diarmuid's. And that, _that_ he understands when it is said slowly and alone. He is to pay for the younger Merville's death with his own life. He wonders, as the Baron screams words he doesn't understand in his face, if anyone will remember him. If anyone will even notice his absence. Surely his brothers will realize eventually that Diarmuid and the others aren't coming back, but how long will that take? Will they ever really know?

A hard slap across his cheek brings Diarmuid back to his current situation. His hands are retied around the pole behind his back. The Baron cocks his fist and punches him across the eye, into his stomach, on his mouth. Diarmuid closes his eyes and let go of the tears he was holding as the Baron exhausts himself, throwing every ounce, every shred of anger into making Diarmuid hurt.

The Baron spits in his face and turns on his heel to leave. Diarmuid sinks to the ground and lets his eyes close.

* * *

Night falls, but it is still hours before all the soldiers go to sleep. It isn't like the wild, merrymaking celebration Diarmuid witnessed before. The mood is somber, reserved, and mourning. When a soldier does spare him a glance, they spit in his direction. To them, he is the reason Raymond de Merville and their other compatriots are dead, and when they are done with him, they will burn him where he sits. He tries unsuccessfully not to imagine the hate he will see in their eyes as they watch him scream and beg and _die_.

He wants desperately to stay awake, alert to the camp around him, but the exhaustion has settled in his bones and his soul, and his eyes start to close on their own. Eventually, he lets them.

When he awakes, it is to a hand covering his mouth. His noise of shock is muffled by the rough palm. He bites down, and the hand removes itself. But he knows that screaming for help will do him no good. These men don't care what happens to him so long as it is horrible, long, and painful.

He prays silently, tears streaming unbidden down his bruised, raw cheeks until his hands come loose of the ropes. And suddenly he is being lifted to his feet, dragged away from the encampment that was to be his death site. The hand returns to its place over his mouth, not only keeping him silent, but also keeping his head from turning. He is still too tired to stay awake, he realizes. As another hand lifts him into strong arms against a solid body, he allows himself to drift off once again.


	2. Blood & Bile

When Diarmuid wakes for longer than a few seconds, he is warm. It is still night—or perhaps it is night again. His body still aches, and his eye is swollen shut. But he is lying on a makeshift blanket, under a haphazard shelter. Someone sits silently next to him. He struggles to sit up, his body fighting him on every inch. He can barely make out the form that tends the flames in front of them, but he knows exactly who it is. He thinks for a minute that he is hallucinating, seeing what he so desperately wants to see in a last attempt to comfort himself before he dies at the hands of the Baron de Merville.

But when he reaches out an unbound hand to touch the Mute's shoulder, he feels solid. Warm and real against Diarmuid's palm. The Mute turns to look at him, and that might be the ghosts of a reassuring smile carved on his lips, but Diarmuid cannot be sure.

Still, every breath burns an excruciating pain through his chest, and his stomach has not fared any better. He coughs wetly into his hand, leaving blood behind on it. His body gives up trying to stay upright, and he falls forward, his forehead landing on the shoulder of the Mute, who wraps his arms around Diarmuid protectively. He lays Diarmuid back out on the cloth gently, as if one false move could destroy him. Diarmuid supposes it could. He also supposes it will not even take that.

His stomach heaves, turning out bile and blood in equal measure. He feels the Mute's warm hand on his cheek, and he leans into it. His body is slick with sweat, but he shivers uncontrollably. He is struck with the thought that he will not make it to morning alive. He opens his mouth to pray, or speak to the Mute, or say anything at all, but nothing comes out but more blood.

The Mute takes Diarmuid's face in both his hands, pressing their foreheads together. Diarmuid's eyes close. He can feel consciousness slip out of his fingers, and he takes one of what he is sure will be few breaths he has left on this Earth, ragged, hitching, and painful in his chest. Just before he slips under the waves of darkness, however, the crook of his shoulder erupts in pain centered around a crescent of teeth.

This time, when he opens his mouth, a scream escapes. His thoughts are swallowed by feverish agony.

* * *

The Mute knows one thing above all else: he would do anything for Diarmuid. From the second he opened his eyes on the shore of Kilmannán to see a strange young monk, their fates had been inextricably tied together. As much as he had hoped Diarmuid would be able to lift him into the light of God—a God the Mute no longer believes in—he knows that what he has just done will more likely drag Diarmuid down to the ranks of the damned like him.

Still, it is hard to believe that any God could create a creature as pure, as crookedly perfect as Diarmuid and ever stand to forsake it for even a second.

The sun peeks above the horizon sliver by sliver, and the Mute watches Diarmuid shiver and writhe in pain. He watches the bruises and lacerations heal themselves, leaving dried blood smeared across unbroken skin. Diarmuid's body knits itself back together perfectly even as his pale, sweat-sheened face twists in pain. Pathetic whimpers escape his parted lips, but his eyes stay blessedly closed.

The Mute tries not to think about the possibility—the very real possibility, given Diarmuid's unwavering faith in the Lord—that Diarmuid will reject the only life the Mute has to offer him. He looks back to the fire, poking at it absently with a stick.

Whatever comes, they will face it together.


	3. Fire & Freedom

Diarmuid's body is on fire. Every cursed inch burns in a pain he's never experienced before, and every second it gets exponentially worse. His eyes are cemented shut, and although he tries, he can't manage a scream. He tries to hang on to the last sight he saw—the Mute, his dearest friend, looking down on him with affection—but his thoughts are pulled away by an intrusive question.

 _Is this Hell?_

Has he truly been so wicked, so impious as to suffer for all eternity? Is this his punishment for allowing Frére Geraldus to die and tossing out the relic?

It's hours, days, weeks before his eyes finally force themselves open, and his body releases a high, pathetic whine. His vision still blurs. The fire douses itself slowly, leaving his body reluctantly. The blessed freedom begin in his core, deep in his belly and moves outward but by bit, making its way to the tips of his fingers and toes. A dark shape manifests above him in what appears to be early morning light. A cool, solid shape rests gingerly on his cheek. Diarmuid once again finds himself lifted into strong, comforting arms.

* * *

The Mute doesn't rest while Diarmuid changes. He tries to keep himself busy, foraging for food, firewood, and clean water, tending the fire, gently washing the blood off Diarmuid's limbs. He doesn't pray. There is no reason for God to listen to someone like him. Someone who so long ago abandoned the path of the righteous. No amount of service to the monks could erase what he'd done, no matter how fervently they prayed for him.

It's two nights before Diarmuid lets out a pitiful cry. The Mute scrambles from where he was tending the fire—lower now, as the sun breaks over the horizon—to his side. He lifts him, cradles him to his chest. Diarmuid's head rests on his shoulder, and he pants into the crook of the Mute's neck in pain. The Mute remembers wondering if he had gone to Hell, all those years ago. He wishes it could have been another way.

The old woman had said that was part of his curse—he would lose everyone he would ever love unless he put them through the same agony he'd faced.

The Mute wishes losing Diarmuid didn't feel so much like his own personal Hell. He wishes he was brave enough to face it instead of forcing Diarmuid—barely nineteen now—to face immeasurable pain. He wishes he weren't such a selfish man.

* * *

When Diarmuid truly awakens again, he has his forehead buried in the Mute's neck. The Mute's arms are solid around him, a shield against the world. Diarmuid takes a shuddering breath. It feels as though it's the first time his lungs have truly been filled. He turns his head, and the world around him is clearer than its ever been. He can feel the Mute's eyes on him, but he can't tear his own away from the crackling fire, low but steady and sparkling with each twist of flame. He moves out of the Mute's arms and stands shakily, soaking in the brilliant green of the forest at daybreak.

He finally turns back to his companion, who is watching him with an expression of worry etched across his face.

"Are you alright?" Diarmuid asks, his voice rough.

The Mute's eyes widen. He points to his mouth, and then to Diarmuid.

"I can speak," Diarmuid says. Every word seems to shock the Mute more and more. The man scrambles to his feet and takes Diarmuid by the shoulders. One hand comes up to his cheek, and Diarmuid holds it there with his own, reveling in the sharp contrast in temperature with his recent experience. "I can speak," he says again. "You can't. We thought—" his voice breaks, and his eyes well with tears. "We thought it was a vow of silence."

The Mute shakes his head solemnly. He makes a gesture with his hand, and somehow Diarmuid understands it perfectly.

"It's a curse."


	4. Lost & Found

**1097, Constantinople**

The Breton knight-captain stumbles through the dusty street to an alleyway, most of his armor long abandoned. His nose is broken, and the bite on his hand bleeds more than he's ever seen of a wound so small. The Turk's crazed eyes as he bit down play in the soldier's mind over and over. He peels away the plate mail as quickly as he can. Sweat builds on his whole body, his system heating to a fever pitch.

The sounds of a skirmish snap his gaze to the other end of the alleyway. Another knight, holding the throat of a boy no older than15, snaps orders at a soldier barring the boy's weeping mother from interfering.

"If you are old enough to fight," the knight spits at the boy in Latin, "you are old enough to die." The Breton feels his stomach sink. Although he opens his mouth to stop the knight, no words come out, and the knight drives his blade into the child's belly.

His mother wails, a heart piercing cry of pain. The knight and the soldier rejoin the fray on the streets, and the mothers cradles her son against her as he coughs out his last blood-soaked breaths. The Breton falls to his knees, and her eyes fall upon him.

"You," she says in stilted Latin. "You could have stopped this. You could have said something." She clutches the cross at her throat. "You are already cursed with eternity, but you shall lose your words as well. You'll forget your own name. You will lose everyone you love, or you will curse them to your fate."

The Turkish soldier's blade sinks into his chest. The Breton wonders if the woman can feel him lose eternity as he fades, slipping into hellfire.

He burns for so long, he's sure he is headed to his final punishment. He is relieved.

But he awakens in a line of his fallen comrades, placed with his arms crossed across his chest on a barren field just a quarter mile from his camp. The blood still crusts his shirt, the hole where the blade cut through him leading only to his skin instead of a wound. In fact, the only evidence of any wound he has from the battle is a silvery-white crescent of teeth scarred on his hand.

He stumbles to his feet, and his mind is assaulted with a barrage of unfamiliar images. Wide brown eyes, a tangled mop of curly brown hair, a thin, crooked smile, and black robes. He falls back to his knees and opens his mouth to call for help. No words come out. Not a sound is released from his mouth no matter how hard he tries.

He considers going back to camp, rejoining his brothers in their war, but as he looks back at the orange glow from the fire, he feels a strange force pull him away. He thinks of the lives he took and the blood he spilled onto the streets of Constantinople. He walks the other way. Northwest, he thinks.

Maybe, maybe, he can find a way to atone for all he's done.

He walks over mountains, across land barren and fertile, through villages and cities. He follows that pull he feels no matter what direction it takes.

He loses it on a fishing boat in1204. The emptiness it leaves behind stops him from hoping that he's found where he's supposed to be, but the boat capsizes in a brutal storm.

He wakes up on a beach, and he has no idea how much time he's lost—it doesn't really matter to him since he has so much. A hand is on his cheek, softer than any he's felt in at least fifty years. A soft, young voice speaks a language he's never heard. When he opens his eyes, they meet the soft brown he'd been seeing in fleeting visions for over a century.

His thoughts have long since lost their form as words, but just once the curse lifts its hold on his mind.

 _Oh_ , he thinks, it's you.


End file.
